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SEARCHING New Scientist‘s website newscientist.com for stories about the elusive Higgs particle, Trevor Dudley was startled to read an advert under the “Ads by Google” banner offering “The Large Hadron Collider” for sale. An added incentive was that you could “bid or buy on eBay with confidence” thanks to the company’s new buyer protection programme.

“Make sure you get it in writing” exhorts the Which? ad. It continues&colon; “Get unlimited legal advice from the qualified lawyers at Which? – by email and phone”

For Trevor, this raises a number of questions, such as&colon; “Does it include batteries?” and “What form of protection does eBay have in mind for me?” The most significant, however, may be&colon; “If I were successful in my bid, what would the postage cost?”

OUR recent discussion of quantum instructions such as “queue both sides” mentioned the assertion of a mathematician reader that such signs “do in fact make sense” (21 January). So we were pleased to receive a message from the quantum instructions coalface that develops the argument.

Graham Berry tells us that&colon; “As a train dispatcher at Cambridge station (the bloke who literally blows the whistle for a living) I have long been aware of the incongruity of the verbal instructions I’m sometimes obliged to deliver (at high volume) such as ‘Please use all available doors!’ I often add the caveat ‘but not simultaneously’, and then, by way of clarification (this is Cambridge after all) ‘Unless you’re in some kind of quantum state’.